Is Gran Torino Eastwood’s True Grit?

Michael Russnow, writing for The Huffington Post, says it hasn’t been easy for Clint Eastwood to find roles that fit his no-nonsense personality, but in Gran Torino he inhabits just such a role, with “a lovely portrayal — not always easy to watch — of a man faced with a transition that comes just in time at the tail end of his life.”

Eastwood’s voice is not suddenly full of fire. It is equipped with an old man’s crackle and doesn’t often shift no matter the emotion of the moment. But in this story by Dave Johansson and Nick Schenk and with the spare and pointed dialogue in Nick Schenk’s screenplay, and with those ever haunting eyes that always made you believe Eastwood would kill you as Dirty Harry, it all comes together and works. Perhaps only for this film in this wonderful manner, but no matter because it’s a superb achievement…

John Wayne found True Grit towards the end of his career and now Clint Eastwood has done the same with an unforgettable performance in Gran Torino, a film that is so simple in its telling that it almost slips by how powerful it really is.

It’s hard to find a review that doesn’t say Gran Torino is one of the peaks of Eastwood’s acting career. I don’t buy into the idea that the Academy hands out Best Actor nominations as “farewell to acting” souvenirs — especially not to multiple Oscar winners who’ve already been nominated several times across three categories. (For that matter, I don’t know if I buy into this film being Eastwood’s “farewell to acting” at all. Fool me once, and all that.) But Gran Torino does seem to be one of those rare alignments of personality, persona and personification that comes along once in a lifetime for an actor — and when it caps off a lifetime like Clint Eastwood’s, can the result be anything but iconic?